Colin's Take of the PlayStation 3 Version The tumultuous and inconsistent experience I had with Broken Steel on the PS3 necessitated this slight addition to Erik's otherwise spot-on review, which we drew from the Xbox 360 release several months ago. As someone who has played through Broken Steel in its entirety on 360 for our guide, I can tell you with certainty that the PS3 version is far more buggy and prone to problems than its 360 counterpart, at least in my experience.

Unfortunately, it's hard to pinpoint the perceived origin of these problems. Briefly scouring several forums on the web has shown me that some people have found even more problems with it than I did. And others still played through Broken Steel with nary an issue popping up, suggesting that it can't possibly be an issue with the downloaded file. For me, the problems were many. For Fallout 3, however, this inconsistency in experience seems to be par for the course.

Some of the problems I encountered were mild. There were considerable dips in framerate, especially during the early-going, and the game would outright stutter at times. Some voice tracks would start after a person's mouth had already been moving, creating awkward situations where something is still being spoken for five seconds even after the character's lips had stopped moving.

However, the issues weren't limited only to the aesthetics. The game froze multiple times on me, including three times at the same exact point, when I was trying to go back into the Citadel after the second of the three main quests in Broken Steel were completed. I also experienced problems with both my own team and enemy squads. My team would remain fixated on random enemies in both the attack on the Jefferson Memorial and, later, near the end of Broken Steel when you're at Adams Air Force Base. They would refuse to continue until sometimes three or four of my comrades were huddled around the same enemy, incapable of actually killing said foe. Meanwhile, Liberty Prime and myself were way, way ahead of them (in the former example, anyway). I never experienced this problem, having beaten the game four times now.

In terms of enemy squads, I found that there were times when nearby enemies wouldn't react to my presence until they actually saw me. Even if there was a heated gunfight involving multiple enemies in the same room, until the enemies laid eyes on me upon my moving into the subsequent room, they wouldn't move or pull out a weapon and fight. It was a strange issue, and while it wasn't one I experienced more than a few times, it's certainly the first time I saw these issues in the game. The AI is supposed to hear gunfire and commotion happening ten feet from them, but in those cases, they were none the wiser.

I've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with Fallout 3. I beat the game twice on PlayStation3 for our guide last year, and have played through each and every piece of DLC on Xbox 360, also for our guide. I know the game pretty well at this point. My experience with Broken Steel on PS3 was, at best, mixed. It got pretty clean to the point of no problems by the end, but at that point, I had already run the gamut of issues pertaining to the DLC.

Is this just an example of Fallout 3 being Fallout 3? It could be. But we'd be loath not to inform you that our experience with the DLC simply wasn't as clean as it should have been, and that you very well may run into the same problems. Then again, you may not. Welcome to the world of Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 -- Broken Steel

Fallout 3 -- Broken Steel is the third and final action-packed expansion for Fallout 3.

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The Verdict

Lifting the level cap breathes new life into a great game, but shouldn't totally overshadow a new series of quests that is a lot of fun. By extending the game beyond the main quest, Bethesda has delivered exactly what the fans have been asking for. Broken Steel offers more than enough reasons to justify the $10 price tag.